City approves sale of old Bailey Broom Factory

RAW Design representative and architect Jon Jeremonis was in Kingston on Wednesday to take a walk through the neighbourhood and get another look at the firm’s new purchase, the Bailey Broom Factory.

"It’s a beautiful building with great bones on it," Jeremonis said. "[As architects], we do all sorts of buildings and one of our specialties is buildings [like the Bailey Broom Factory and the nearby Woolen Mill], which are heritage buildings, brick and beam, that get retrofitted and repurposed for modern uses."

The sale comes two years after a group of citizens organized to save the old Bailey Broom Factory from demolition.

Following council consent on Tuesday, RAW Design assumes the property at the corner of Rideau and Cataraqui streets for $1 with the goal of cleaning up the property, stabilizing the site and restoring and retrofitting the existing building to turn it into offices for the firm as well as incubator office space for startup businesses.

That phase of the project is expected to be completed in 2021 at a cost of about $1.7 million to the company.

By the time the deal closes in early 2017, taxpayers will have spent $310,000 for purchasing the building and maintaining it for the past two years.

Mayor Bryan Paterson recalled being opposed to the city taking on the property in 2014 when he was a city councillor.

"I had real concerns about the amount of money this was going to cost us," Paterson said. "It is unfortunate that it has cost us more than we had hoped. We would have liked to have sold it for more … but this is the best option before us."

RAW Design Inc. is a full-service architecture firm based in Toronto, and Jeremonis is looking forward to the project in Kingston.

"Kingston is an amazing city," he said. "It’s so exciting and vibrant and we’re excited to come to Kingston because there is a whole new kind of world of opportunity out here that we don’t have in Toronto."

The company has completed retrofits on larger heritage buildings in the Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto areas.

"We had a tannery project in Kitchener-Waterloo. It’s a giant old heritage building, like 400,000 square feet of old factory space and we master-planned and retrofitted it for high-tech offices and various different uses," Jeremonis said.

Jeremonis found that those building improvements helped boost the community engagement, as well as the local economy.

"We like the Kingston area because it’s a perfect blend of atmosphere, nature and architecture, so it’s right up our alley in a lot of ways," Jeremonis said.

This will be the first branch office for RAW Design and Jeremonis will be the Kingston branch manager and head architect.

"I had worked [in Kingston] previously, probably about seven years ago, right out of school," Jeremonis said. "I had a job at Shoaltz and Zaback Architects Inc. [in the Woolen Mill] and loved it here. I only worked here for about a year."

Along with a small RAW Design branch office, the firm is looking to create "affordable accelerator space for local startups, and a cafe to serve as a hub for neighbourhood gathering and discussion, fortifying the connection between small-scale business and the surrounding community."

"We’ve heard from the community and heritage groups," Jeremonis said. "I think when the building has been retrofitted and in its final form, it will be a real asset to the community because our vision for the building is to take this beautiful old thing that is run down and decaying and make it relevant again by fixing it up and filling it with a community-orientated cafe incubator-type space."

RAW Designs is hoping to have the space ready for occupancy as early as fall 2018.